With a little bit of a delay due to the RTX 3070 and new CPUs, we have our EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra review for you today. EVGA's FTW3 Ultra left a great impression in our RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 FTW3 reviews, so the bar is set high. Out of the box, EVGA is running their card at a rated boost of 1800 MHz, which is 6% higher than the NVIDIA default of 1695 MHz. This is at the upper end of the boost clock range, only a handful of cards go higher, to 1845 and 1860 MHz. In real-life, this overclock and the power limit increase to a generous 420 W turn into a 4% performance uplift over the base RTX 3090, or 14% over the RTX 3080. This makes the FTW3 Ultra 50% faster than both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070, almost twice as fast as RTX 2080. AMD's fastest, the Radeon RX 5700 XT, is less than half as fast, but AMD has announced that their Big Navi cards will catch up.

Such performance numbers definitely make the RTX 3090 suitable for 4K resolution gaming. Many games will run at over 90 FPS. At highest details in 4K, nearly all settle in at over 60 FPS—only Control is slightly below that, but DLSS will easily boost FPS beyond that. At lower resolutions, you'll often run into CPU bottlenecks with even a fast processor, like our highly overclocked Core i9-9900K. Still, for 1440p, I could imagine high-refresh-rate gamers considering the RTX 3090 to drive their monitors at 120 FPS and beyond.

With RTX 3090, NVIDIA is introducing "playable 8K," which rests on several pillars. In order to connect an 8K display, you previously had to use multiple cables. Now, you can just use a single HDMI 2.1 cable. At a higher resolution, VRAM usage goes up, but the RTX 3090 has you covered, offering 24 GB of memory, which is more than twice that of the 10 GB RTX 3080. Last but not least, on the software side, they added the capability to capture 8K gameplay with Shadow Play. In order to improve framerates (remember 8K processes 16x as many pixels as Full HD), NVIDIA created DLSS 8K, which renders the game at 1440p native and scales the output three times in each direction with machine learning. All of these technologies are still in their infancy—game support is limited and displays are expensive, we'll look into this in more detail in the future.

We've praised the EVGA GeForce 30 cooler design before, it's definitely one of the best-looking styles out there. The EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra looks identical to the FTW3 RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 we reviewed only recently. All three cards use the same triple-slot cooler shroud and fan design. Things are different under the hood, though. On the RTX 3090 variant, the same powerful heatsink as on the RTX 3080 is used—six heatpipes to quickly move heat away from the GPU and memory chips. There's also plenty of cooling for the incredibly strong 19+4 phase VRM. Thanks to the amazing cooler and sensible fan settings, the EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra is the quietest RTX 3090 we've tested so far. With just 32 dBA, the card is unbelievably quiet for the FPS it delivers, which is very impressive. NVIDIA has introduced fan stop on their Founders Edition with Ampere, which means all board partners are expected to adopt this crucial feature, too. Outside of gaming, the fans on the FTW3 Ultra will shut off completely for the perfect noise-free experience.

EVGA has increased their card's power limit to 420 W, which is the highest setting of all the RTX 3090 cards we've tested so far. This helps unlock additional performance as NVIDIA's Boost algorithm has more headroom to boost to higher frequencies. The manual adjustment range for overclockers goes up to 450 W, which is great, but the ASUS STRIX gives you more. This is probably why EVGA released an XOC Beta BIOS on their forums that bumps that power limit to 500 W—more than any other card, almost scarily high.

I tested overclocking with the 500 W setting, and it added around 4% real-life performance on top of the maximum manual overclock at the stock power limit. I'm not sure if running at 500 W is reasonable for everyday gaming, but for overclockers, it can definitely make a difference on the leaderboards. Praise to EVGA for offering such unlocked BIOSes in the first place. Other vendors aren't willing to go that far.

24 GB VRAM is definitely future-proof, but I doubt you will really ever need that much memory. Sure, more is always better, but unless you are using professional applications, you'll have a hard time finding a noteworthy performance difference between 10 GB and 24 GB. Games won't be an issue because you'll run out of shading power long before you run out of VRAM, just like with older cards today, which can't handle 4K no matter how much VRAM they have. Next-generation consoles also don't have as much VRAM, so it's hard to image you'll miss out on any meaningful gaming experiences if you have less than 24 GB VRAM. NVIDIA demonstrated several use cases in their reviewer's guide: OctaneRender, DaVinci Resolve, and Blender can certainly benefit from more memory, as can GPU compute applications, but these are very niche use cases. I'm not aware of any creators who were stuck and couldn't create because they ran out of VRAM. On the other hand, the RTX 3090 could definitely turn out to be a good alternative to Quadro, or Tesla, unless you need double-precision math (you don't).

The GeForce RTX 3090 is the only graphics card in the Ampere family that features an NVLink interface for SLI. Implicit multi-GPU (the classic SLI you know) is not available—only explicit multi-GPU is supported. Explicit multi-GPU requires that game developers invest their own time and money to add support for the technology, which simply isn't going to happen because of the tiny market size for the feature. Only a handful of games and benchmarks support explicit multi-GPU. To use even this mode, you'll need to buy a new-generation NVLink bridge separately; the NVLink cable from your RTX 20-series cards won't physically fit. And with NVIDIA reportedly stopping the development of SLI profiles for newer games from 2021 for GPUs that support implicit multi-GPU, we can safely conclude that the age of multi-GPU gaming is over. Buying a pair of RTX 3090 cards for multi-GPU would cater to a very tiny niche, mostly professionals.

Pricing of the RTX 3090 is just way too high, a tough pill to swallow. At a starting price of $1500, it is more than twice as expensive as the RTX 3080, but not nearly twice as fast. EVGA's RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra is listed online for $1800, which is a lot of money—the price increase is very large. $300 extra for the FTW3 Ultra seems a bit much even though the card's physical design is super impressive. I would personally be willing to spend maybe $150–$200 more, mostly for the very quiet gaming experience and awesome power limit, and a VRM that can handle it. NVIDIA emphasizes that the RTX 3090 is a Titan replacement—Titan RTX launched at $2500, so $1500 must be a steal for the new RTX 3090. Part of the disappointment associated with pricing is that the RTX 3080 is priced much more competitively. Both the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 are all sold out, so apparently, there are people out there who are willing to pay these prices and more. AMD just announced their Radeon RX 6900 XT for $999, which hopefully will bring the fight to the RTX 3090, so things could change a lot in this segment in the coming weeks. We'll tell you know more as soon as we can.

In this context, our "Recommended" award obviously is not addressing the average gamer. Rather, it means you should consider this card if you have the money to spend and are specifically looking for an RTX 3090.